South Korea, Japan and Taiwan jointly establish IOWN AI Fund; SK Hynix, Sony and Toshiba among participants targeting AI innovators in North America and Asia
SK Telecom is joining forces with leading Japanese and Taiwanese information and communications technology companies to establish a $500 million AI investment fund. SK Telecom and NTT will anchor the effort, with SK Hynix, Sony, Toshiba and other global firms also set to participate.
The initiative aims to deepen economic and technological ties between South Korea and Japan while accelerating the expansion of the next-generation AI ecosystem.
SK Telecom announced the fund Tuesday at a press briefing at NTT's headquarters in Otemachi, Tokyo. The three companies — SK Telecom, Japan's NTT Group and Taiwan's Chunghwa Telecom — said they would jointly establish the IOWN AI Fund to invest in next-generation AI technologies.
The three partners plan to set up Catalight Capital, a fund management company with bases in Silicon Valley and East Asia, to build a global fund management framework.
SK Telecom said the fund's formation is significant because it marks a joint push by leading East Asian ICT companies to expand the AI ecosystem.
The fund will invest in promising startups across five areas: AI data center infrastructure, including power efficiency optimization and liquid cooling; AI semiconductors such as AI accelerators, GPUs and NPUs; AI service applications spanning healthcare, manufacturing, finance and other industries; AI software for cloud distributed systems and inference optimization; and optical communications technologies that improve data transmission performance and power efficiency. Target companies will be drawn from North America, Asia and Europe.
Beyond financial investment, fund participants will support portfolio companies with technology validation, service enhancement and customer development, with the goal of creating new business models and growing together.
The fund plans to close its first round of investor recruitment shortly and officially launch. NTT said roughly 20 global companies, including Sony and Toshiba, have expressed interest in contributing. SK Hynix is also preparing to join.
SK Telecom said it plans to use the fund as a springboard for broader cross-border economic and technological cooperation with Japan, extending into AI data centers, enterprise (B2B) services and consumer (B2C) services.
NTT CEO Akira Shimada said combining cutting-edge technologies and partners from around the world is essential to realizing AI-native infrastructure. "We will pursue business partnerships with promising startups and create new industrial foundations," he said.
Chunghwa Telecom President Lin Rong-tze said the company would leverage its telecommunications expertise to support global startups through cross-border business development. "We will accelerate the commercialization of advanced technologies and build the next-generation AI ecosystem alongside the best partners," he said.
SK Telecom CEO Jeong Jae-heon said the company has not only made early-stage investments in numerous global AI firms but has also built an AI ecosystem by identifying and nurturing promising startups at home and abroad. "Building on those successes and SK Group's competitiveness, we will continue to expand collaboration opportunities with AI innovators," he said.
Meanwhile, SK Telecom is broadening its global AI infrastructure partnerships on multiple fronts, including a plan with Nvidia to build a gigawatt-scale "AI factory" targeting operation by 2027.
sjpark@heraldcorp.com
